Evolutionary game analysis of coal-mine enterprise internal safety inspection system in China based on system dynamics

Abstract Safety regulation is an important approach to urge coal-mine enterprises to ensure safe production. The existing literature on the analysis of coal mine safety regulation through game methods focuses mainly on external supervision methods such as national and local governments, and lacks research on coal enterprises internal supervision methods. Moreover, these research focus on static analysis of the game between two stakeholders, ignoring the dynamic process of the game. Therefore, this paper explores the use of evolutionary game theory to describe the interactions between the stakeholders in China's coal enterprises internal safety inspection system, which includes the coal-mine owners, the coal-mine safety regulation departments, and rank-and-file miners. Furthermore, the multi-player evolutionary game is simulated by using system dynamics to analyze the stability of stakeholder interactions and the impact of different reward and punishment strategies on the game process and equilibrium state under different scenarios. The simulation results are as follows. First, under the static reward and punishment strategy, increasing the reward and punishment intensity can quickly reduce their unsafe behavior ratio, but at the same time increase the fluctuation in the game. Second, under the dynamic reward and punishment strategy, the stability of the game process is enhanced, but it cannot reach a satisfactory equilibrium value stable state. Last, in order to make the game process with both high stability and high safety behavior ratio, it is necessary to introduce external regulatory forces to act on the internal game system of coal mining enterprises under the dynamic reward and punishment strategy, and at the same time, the punishment intensity of regulation departments and miners should not be the same.